ill LYTeracy: Revisiting David Lynch'sDune

I think, and hope, we have room on this site for longer think-pieces that aren’t necessarily tied to breaking news. I’m sure you’ll all let me know.

Prior to last week, I had watched the 1984 movie Dune exactly once – in a theater, when it came out. At the time, all I knew about it was that it looked amazing and epic, and I was excited to visit new worlds. I also had the idea that it was pretty cool for some dude to name himself “Sting” and play the bad guy. Needless to say, I had no idea who Jose Ferrer or Jurgen Prochnow were, let alone Virgina Madsen or then-unknown Kyle MacLachlan (I think I knew Linda Hunt as one of the voices from The Last Unicorn, which I had hated, and may perhaps need to revisit someday).

I came out thoroughly disappointed. Had I been able to write an articulate review back then, it might have gone something like this:

“This is terrible! The good guy just kills all the bad guys with no problem, he has a voice that can make them do anything, he falls in love with this one girl just so they can have some kissing in it, and it’s trying to be like a Bible story or something, except Jesus didn’t kill like that.” That said, certain things stuck with me – floating, pus-faced Baron Harkonnen made for a memorable image, as did that Third-Stage Guild Navigator mutant in the beginning. The sandworms had been hyped as one of the movie’s big surprises, but honestly, they looked like giant worms; so what? Later, I tried to read the book; finding it too similar to the movie in the early chapters, I gave up, though I did end up reading all of the considerably shorter parody, National Lampoon’s Doon, in which spice and sandworms were replaced with beer and pretzels.

Now I’m older. And I revere the movie’s director, an at-the-time obscure auteur by the name of David Lynch. If somebody told me nowadays that David Lynch was about to make an epic sci-fi movie about a Messiah fable, I’d be all over it. Since he already did, however, I decided that there might be a chance of redemption. So when Dune showed on HBO recently, I DVR’ed it, ready for a revisit. Because I don’t always love Lynch, but I usually respect him. Likewise, Kyle MacLachlan had long since won a place in my heart as Agent Cooper, and that little-known English thespian Patrick Stewart had made something of himself as well. As for Sting…let me just try and remember the days when he really was cool.

So I watched. And like the preteen version of myself, I was initially hooked. And then…

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